Vegårshei Ungdomsskole

On October 7,2008 I visited Vegårshei, a small town of about 1800 people on the southern coast of Norway. The town is very conservative (you still can’t buy alcohol in the town and there wasn’t a restaurant in the vicinity) and has only 50 immigrants, mostly from Somlia. In the past the town was not happy with foreigners coming in and buying up their land, but now they call themselves the "model town" for immigration. They have welcomed the refugees and have made sure they all found homes and jobs/school.

The school is a grade 1-10 school with about 770 students. The elementary is separated from the lower secondary by wings. When the students get into ungdomsskole, they literally move to a new wing of the building which for them they say it is a big transition, but the teachers tell me the transition isn’t really big as there is only one class of students in each of the grades, so they stay together they just get new teachers and a new wing of school.

I did two lessons one with a 9th grade class and one with a 10th grade class. The ninth grade group I had only 17 students as the other 13 were gone for the week. It apparently was moose/elk hunting season and this was the first week of the hunting season, so many of the kids were out hunting. I started the lesson with having the students write down their stereotypes of Americans. Many only jotted down words like Harley Davidson, fat, cool, hamburgers, cheerleaders, and Hollywood. Some wrote phrases like probably very cind [sic], and like sport [sic]. Others wrote sentences; for example, They eat junk food, They are famous, They have big houses and big cars, and They have good jobs. Only two ninth graders had ever met an American before, the rest said they got their information from the internet and TV. They told me they watched House, CSI, and Dawson’s Creek. I did a textset activity with the students. I had 6 different textsets of picture books and the students were to browse the pictures books, discuss what they read, and jot down their thoughts in graffiti format on a piece of paper. To be honest, it’s didn’t go so well. I think they struggled with English more than their teacher realizes. The picture books were too difficult for them to browse easily. I would say of the 6 groups 3 made some sense out of the engagement and the other 3 really struggled. I then had them share with the class, something else that was new to them and they really struggled with that as well. The teacher was not the strictest disciplinarian and it was difficult for me to be too mean when I am supposed to be there as an ambassador for the states. So there were times I just let the kids get out of work rather than push them when they were acting silly. I didn’t watch my time very well, so the conclusion was weak as well. All in all, I started off my lectures on a low note.

The next class was the 10th grade students and I was to do the presidential election with them. This group was much better with English, had stronger community, and were all present. Apparently 10th grade attendance is kept and recorded and is passed on as the students apply for upper secondary school, or videregående skole. So there was no hunting for the 10th graders. I started the lecture off with the four corners (agree/disagree/strongly agree/strongly disagree) activity. I read off contemporary political issues (like Iraq, immigration, abortion, same sex marriages, etc.) and the students went to the corner that represented their opinion. They loved this activity, but struggled with articulating WHY they choose what they did. The next part of the presidential election lesson was similar to the textset lesson in that I split the students up into groups and gave each group a type of media (i.e. bumper stickers, magazine articles, political cartoons, myspace/facebook webpages, and TV interviews). The students were to deconstruct the media provided thinking about the target audience, the author, who’s voice is being heard, etc. The group understood the directions and were engaged with the media. But once again I was surprised at how difficult it was to get them to think critically, or should I say to express their critical thinking in English, because I am not sure which one it is. They struggled with the media activity but worked diligently on it, unlike the 9th graders who just goofed off when they found it difficult. I had four groups and once again I think half of the groups really got it and the other half struggled. Part of the problem with the two groups who struggled was that they had more to work with. I had a bunch of political cartoons and several TV interviews. By the time they got through all of the examples, they didn’t have much time to talk.

The particular teacher wasn’t much about getting in to the class to prepare prior to the lessons. Instead we sat in the teacher’s lounge and drank coffee until 5 minutes before I was to start the lesson. This threw me off a bit and I think that is one of the reasons the second group went better than the first. Part of having me there, I began to realize was for him. He enjoyed talking to me about the lastest terms and phrases. For example, he wanted to know what we called our thumb drives, or flash drives. The teachers in the lounge were all very collegial with one another and when we sat in the teachers’ lounge after the lessons eating our bread and cheese “sandwiches” I noticed that this school was very similar to the one previous, just a little older and smaller.

Two things that I thought were rather interesting. The first was that the teacher whose class I visited was an older man who has a daughter my age. He told me about how in recent years the ministry of education has gone from prioritizing written work to spoken work in the English classes. To him that meant he could tell more stories about growing up in Liverpool. I wonder if that is why the kids struggled a bit when I asked them to articulate their thoughts, yet they understood me fairly well. The second thing is that for some reason I can understand the kids when they talk in Norwegian better than the adults. I am not sure why that is. Maybe I focus more on them when I am teaching or the context is clearer. For example, I know what typical students would say at a particular part of a lesson… I don’t know but when a kid asked me jobber sammen? I answered yes, then stopped to second guess myself; though I needn’t. I was right. I did want them to work together.